Blarg. Wha? Humph.

It’s easy to become overly focused on your own problems. I mean after all they are yours. You have to deal with them. The tired, old, adage of “Some people have it worse than you.”, seems a bit thin at the times in your life where you want to throw your computer monitor into the wall, rip open the three buttons on your middle management shirt, jump on your desk and do the Worgan transformation, then go grab your bosses and scream into their faces about how sick you are of their “more with less” philosophy.

But you don’t because “some people have it worse than you”. So you grit your teeth, put your head down and keep swinging. You do your daily endless paperwork, you listen to the public tell you how to do your job, you crunch the numbers and juggle the stats hoping you make your budget for the year, you stare at the radar praying it stops raining, and you simmer and wait for that heart attack to eventually come.

Yesterday I said I thought Star Wars the Old Republic would have combat system like Champions Online. Of course the laws of the Universe decided to intervene and Bioware just released more details of their combat for Star Wars after I wrote that. (Something to the effect of having Companion NPCs.) So hey while the universe is countering my quips, here’s one for you…

re: Tab targeting

Dear Blizzard.

It sucks balls.

Sincerely,
mrfenris

Seriously, I love having 9 mobs standing in front of me and beating on me and I hit tab target and it finds some fucking lvl 2 Kobold three zones away and seems to think he’s the better choice for my next target instead of the 9 Fel Orcs that are screaming and trying to skull fuck my healer.

Back to Star Wars/Champions/Bullshitting…

Does it seem to counter what I mentioned in my blurb? No, not really but yes it could, all at the same time. The addition of NPC companions that promise to have “programmable” actions means that you could possible have an instant party at your fingertips. So maybe combat isn’t you stand there and shoot, you press your buttons, you never are in danger, easy mode that I predict it will be. Or did it just get easier via companions “LOL Talk to people why? I just throw out my pokeball and yell “Jediz I choose u!””.

(Secret: I swear to God if I could have nine companions in WoW, I wouldn’t need a guild.)

But where’s the fun in that? A friend and I were halfassedly, bullshitting around, talking about Star Wars. To sum it up…

My basic point is that as of right now Star Wars is not an MMO in any sort of social sense. It’s a single player game and I’m sure like Warcraft you can solo it all the way to the end. I mean I can’t think of anything non-instanced in WoW that you need a party for.

Yes even your elite mobs. Just wait a level or two and you can solo them. Not to mention that you could just skip the quest. No really you slaves, you can skip quests.

But I’m left thinking. Aren’t all MMO’s single player games outside of “instance” content? Even going back to my lowly days of Ultima Online, I never had to take a group into a Dungeon.

Hell even in Warcraft one doesn’t need a guild in order to see instances. You can just hop in LFG and be joined by a bunch of soulless, mindless, non-communicating “bots” that will no doubt be less three-dimensional then Star War’s companion NPCs.

What is an MMO? You obviously don’t have to rely on people in order to experience 90% of their content. Does playing an MMO just mean that you just have to share the server’s bandwidth with a bunch of other people? Is there ever truly a game where players are actually tied together inclusively; Where their presence and interactions define the game? Further if there is such a game or ever will be, I’m betting it’s a PvP oriented game.

And so I sit here, waiting for my heart attack, and wondering if I’m wrong. Maybe Star wars the Old Republic combat won’t be like Champions Online (I just push buttons and they die LOLZ).

Maybe it’ll be just like Mass Effect instead.

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Final Fantasy XI is a very group-oriented game. You can get up to about level 10 before things become harder and harder to kill solo. They’ve been trying to make it easier by implementing “books” (their version of hourly quests) and level-syncing so that you can at least play with friends no matter the level you are. But I don’t know if it’s even possible to solo the game.